Wednesday, April 24, 2013

I've come across a number of websites for people that Brian Stalin has matched with a past life. Christie Bella believes she was once Queen Victoria. The experiment with handwriting on this page is interesting.

This man was linked to Charles Crocker, who was a railway pioneer in the US. It's a bit odd to be able to read your own obituary.

It's really hard not to assume that Brian Stalin is Dennis Peasant, Gary Se7en and Brian Stalin. It makes me uncomfortable when people describe themselves in the third person and also state that they are considered the world's leading expert in X. It's probably something about English reticence about blowing your own trumpet. What I see most people do is either dismissing his conclusions out of hand or saying he is interesting. I have yet to find *one* person independently stating that they think he is the leading expert - unless they take direct quotes from his own website....

It would be a lot more likeable to simply state his qualifications and training, rather than making wild claims to be the best in the world. He talks about ego getting in the way... well there seems to be quite a large ego in the way here, to me. And it muddies the water.

That being said, I do think that there is something worth investigating here. I am experimenting with dowsing and researching the match he made for me too.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

As Brian Stalin notes on one of his webpages, some people seem to hate things they were associated in previous lives. However, it seems to me that a lot of people retain their interests and passions.

I have been interested by an apparent connection between living people and people from the past, especially when they resemble the person from the past and share their passion too. For example, there is a young man involved in the Zeitgeist movement, Peter Joseph, who very much resembles Trotsky:

Trotsky as a young man, and Peter Joseph

I also noticed that the person who keeps being arrested for hiking naked, Stephen Gough, bore an uncanny resemblance to a drawing of James Naylor, an early Quaker who also stripped naked for religious reasons.

Then I noticed that a young lady with an interest in prison welfare, Edwina Grosvenor, seemed to be uncannily like Elizabeth Fry.

It seemed like these links were jumping out at me all the time, and I collected quite a few. Unlike Brian Stalin, I am not able to verify these with the akashic record, and I have only the odd circumstance of the passion and resemblance to go on. But I think they are interesting, none the less.

I remember as a child lying in bed, looking at the wall and thinking how miraculous it was that I existed now, after millions of years of human evolution, here I was living, breathing and experiencing the now. It made my head turn inside out, trying to think of the time before my birth when I didn't exist, and I came to believe that an eternal spirit had to have existed before, as well as after, life.

I didn't know anything much about reincarnation, except in the vaguest way as part of a superficial investigation into comparative religion. I didn't much think about it either, until the night that I shook hands with a stranger in a pub in Harrow.

My husband and I were in a pub quiz team that played other pubs in the region. We would sometimes play at home and sometimes in the pubs we were playing against. The normal routine was for us to travel together with the landlord of our pub, have a drink, meeting the other team, play the quiz and go home.

I wasn't expecting anything different when I arrived in the pub in Harrow, and I didn't know any of the members of the other team. However, when I shook hands with one of the people, I received a jolt... I felt immediate warm feelings of recognition, like an old friend not seen for many years, and a jumble of memories and snapshots fell into my head.

I saw myself ironing in a dark flat, with someone I knew to be my sister Amanda next to me and this man. Then I saw us in a club, dancing. The club was clearly from the 1950s and I was born in 1958 and so I fairly quickly realised there was something very strange about the experience. I had vague impressions of us together as a threesome, and snapshotty impressions. I soon realised that despite the great warmth of love and affection, it was based on nothing, I couldn't grasp any actual fact from that apparent memory which would link it to a time and place.

I have to mention here a circumstance which isn't strictly relevant, but helps to explain my interest in things spiritual. When my daughter was very small, I went to my first Quaker meeting. I had the impression, not that I wanted to be a Quaker, or could understand Quakers, but that I had always been a Quaker and just hadn't realised it. When I was a teenager, I had repeated dreams and visions about being in a very simple room, dressed in grey. I thought I was a nun, but now I wasn't so sure. Maybe the grey was Quaker dress?

About that same time, when Kate was three months old, I was walking down the local high street when I had a transcendant experience of God. Unexpectedly. I don't know quite how to describe the feeling, but I felt I was high up and that I was both part of God and my own individual self. I had been worrying about the idea of being subsumed into God, as the end result of life, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be subsumed - I liked my individuality. I found my fears were assuaged by this experience when I understood how it was possible to be part of a greater thing and yet retain individuality. I also experience an overwhelming sense of love for everyone and everything I could see.

I don't know how long that experience lasted but of course that experience made me know that I was part of God and that God was a part of me - and all that is - and that He loves us unconditionally. It changed it from a matter of faith to a matter of experience, for me.

Several years later, I went for an anniversary weekend to Rye in Sussex, which is where we spent out short honeymoon on getting married. We went to the Martello bookshop, which was then still run by a rather eccentric woman called Cynthia Reavell. She used to handwrite reviews of the books on card and place them on the books in the shop. She seemed to spend her time doing that and protesting at any article which claimed that E.F. Benson, local author, was actively homosexual.

I picked up a book called Destiny, which is the book by Martin Heald about his gradual understanding that he was an airman who had been shot down in the Second World War. I didn't read it until I was on my way home, and about three or four days after I started reading it I came across the description of his remembered experience between lives... which I had dreamed about in extreme detail a few weeks before, long before I had bought it or even knew of its existence.

I was so struck by this circumstance, that I wrote to Martin Heald, who was nice enough to reply to me. It was hard not to feel that I had been meant to read the book.

Once I got online in 1998, I started to look for information about reincarnation, and found various websites which purported to show evidence of reincarnation. The site which impressed me a lot was that set up by Joseph Myers and showed a great number of photographs of supposed reincarnation cases.

Some of his cases, it has to be said, ARE too good to be true, as he links people who overlap in life, on the basis that maybe parallel lives are a possibility. I can't say for sure, but it seems unlikely.

I continued to research, and as more and more was added to the internet, I found more and more websites talking about the possibility of reincarnation, about near death experiences.
Then something rather strange started to happen. It's hard to explain, and the feeling that people will consider me deluded or mad has crossed my mind. I have always had fairly useless prophetic dreams, about really ridiculous things. Never anything useful, always about what I am going to read in the headlines in the paper, or programmes on tv, stupid trivial things, which aren't impressive and aren't going to save the world from disaster.

Sometimes I didn't know what they were until afterwards. I dreamed I was in a car and a man jumped into the road in front of me, holding a teddybear in front of his face. The car spun out of control and turned over and that's all I remember. I had the dream about three days before Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris. Maybe that was coincidence, maybe it had nothing to do with it. It seemed an odd concatination of events.

The point is there is a certain feeling I associate with those sorts of dreams. I can't verbalize what it is except to say it sort of clicks into place. It has a quality which is different from a "normal" dream. Then I started to get that feeling when I looked at pictures of people... not always, just some of the time.

This is very hard to explain. I sometimes know when I have received a letter or email before I know it for a fact, and when I do, I know that I know - it isn't just a feeling but a knowing, and has a different feel emotionally altogether. Perhaps you just have to be there, I don't know.

Anyway, I would suddenly have a name pop into my head when I saw a picture, and I would get that click and feeling of knowing, randomly. I didn't know how or why. I still don't know if this is a real thing or not. But some of them impressed me!

I remember the first time I felt it and heard the name was when I watched a four year old perform on Britain Has got Talent...and thought of Eva Cassidy as soon as I saw her. OK, you don't have to be psychic to think Eva Cassidy when someone sings Over the Rainbow

But the next photograph I saw was a picture of the violinist and composer Nigel Kennedy and the name Scriabin jumped in. Now, I accept that having done music A level at school, I may have come across the picture of Scriabin at some stage, and my subconscious may simply have made the connection. But I was pretty stunned when I compared the picture of the two:

I became ever more interested in the subject. I continued to research and found the Return of the Revolutionaries website, which seemed to have a lot of suggested cases. All of them, or virtually all, are disputed by Brian Stalin, and so I became interested in what he had to say.

I have read his website, and looked at the things he has said. He is in favour or using love to heal the world, but it has to be said that his comments about people who believe they have gained knowledge from hypnosis or psychics is not terrifically moderate or loving. But I contacted him and asked him to do a reading for me. According to Brian Stalin, I was Francoise Marie de Bourbon in a previous life.

I don't know what I expected... that I would feel something connects us, or some sort of recognition. I was taken to Versailles by the French family I stayed with when I was about 15 years old, and I don't remember feeling any particular feeling about the place when I was there.

I started to research the background for Francoise Marie... and there are certain things that resonate. I have a slight lopsidedness to my face, she was a bit lopsided too. I would say I am physically lazy, and she seems to have been very physically lazy. She could write very well - even the Count de Saint Simon, who wasn't her greatest fan, said that she wrote very well... and I can write.

However, there isn't much else that I can say. I don't think I am a very good match facially for her now that I am older... and I'm not sure I ever was. I don't have a scanner at the moment, or I would upload a few less wrinkly pictures of myself for comparison.

He also told me that my daughter, Kate was Louise Francoise de Bourbon. Now I was pretty sceptical about these being right simply because it seems like a lot of people who have readings end up as part of the court of the sun King, Louis XIV. But the comparison of photographs is quite stunning in her case:

There is something of her in the picture of Louise Francoise de Bourbon. She's a skeptic and so thinks I am completely crazy, but that's ok. I am not at all sure that I know whether this is right or not. But I am intrigued to know what I can know about it.

I have been reading memoirs and trying to work out whether I can deduce anything from what has been written about Louise or Francoise Marie. As it happens, there is a lot written about the court of Louis XIV. Many of the women kept journals or wrote frequent letters, and there is always the Count de Saint Simon, recording, and plotting and recording some more. I believe that his memoirs are considered the best ever written in any language, and that may be so.

I'm reserving judgement of what I have been told, but I hope that by searching for answers I may find new light on the matter. Fortunately I am fascinated by history and so it is not a chore to read a lot of memoirs from the 18h century!

Wikipedia, in its roundup of reincarnation says that Ian Stevenson reported that belief in reincarnation is held (with
variations in details) by adherents of almost all major religions except
Christianity and Islam.
In addition, between 20 and 30 percent of persons in western countries
who may be nominal Christians also believe in reincarnation

Christianity

Reincarnation was allegedly excised from the bible in the time of Constantine. He didn't do a very good job, however, as there are a lot of references to rebirth and to past lives. John the Baptist was said to be the reincarnation of Elijah, and so on through some very dreary yes he was no he wasn't sorts of discussions. There are lots of web pages which discuss what may or may not be known about reincarnation in the Christian tradition.

Hinduism

Reincarnation is an intrinsic part of Hinduism, in which birth, death and rebirth are an important tenet.

Islam

Although mainstream Islam rejects the doctrine of reincarnation, there are a number of mystical and sufi groups which include it as a part of their beliefs.

Judaism

While reincarnation is not an essential tenet of traditional Judaism, it forms an essential part of Kabbalah, the mystical school of teaching.

Wicca

Many Wiccans believe in reincarnation, but it isn't an essential tenet of belief. It is hard to say what those might be, any way, as there is no central authority.

Ourside the main religions in the west, there is widespread belief in reincarnation. Hinduism, Buddhism and many others believe in the reincarnation of the soul. Some provide information about the rules and regulations, the role of karma, etc.

Modern new age thinking incorporates elements of everything in a soup of belief that can be wide enough to encompass parallel lives, soul groups, pre-birth contracts between individuals or groups and a whole lot more.

Many people are sceptical of information produced by psychics and channels. There is indisputably a large crowd of charlatans queuing up to denude people of their money, although I believe that there is such a thing as a psychic. Channelling is even more dubious to the general public, not only does it appear to be rather a psychologically dangerous pasttime, opening yourself up to some other entity to use your body and mind, but it also seems very open to abuse and deceit. I have read of psychological tests using a completely fabricated entity but which still generated results not unlike contact from a disembodied person.

Brian Stalin is particularly vehement that the results from psychics and channels are not to be trusted. He publishes corrections to many of the cases which are included on the Return of the Revolutionaries website, many of which have come from Kevin Ryerson, channel for Ahtun Re.

I can't say who is right, but the dispute is an interesting one, because it may reveal more than the cases do themselves. To a lay person with little experience of either channels or pendulums, it seems that both may be equally fallible. Either may be delusions and not real at all. an interesting circumstance is that generally (but not always) if I use a pendulum to dowse, it agrees with Brian Stalin. I'm not even sure myself if that counts for anything. I'd be interested to know what happens if people who are used to dowsing try it.

For well over a century, the west has known about the idea of the Akashic records, apparently a supernatural record of everything that have ever or will ever happen, including records of our past present and future lives, which some people say that they can access for information. Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet" was referring to the Akashic record when he obtained information during a reading, his trance self said, although a lot of what he said in a trance state actually conflicted with his own beliefs.

There are mystics and psychics who say that they are able to access the Akashic records and obtain information about the past lives of individuals. One of the most controversial of these is Brian Stalin, who, on first sight, seems to have taken nearly every famous case purporting to prove the reality of reincarnation, and to disprove it - or counter it with a reading which leads in a different direction. Thus he disagrees that Sherrie Lea Laird is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, that Jeffrey Keene is the reincarnation of General Gordon or that James Leininger is the reincarnation of James Huston. Thus he discounts many of the cases which have persuaded people that reincarnation might be a real thing.

Of course, if he is right, then it raises other questions about the purpose of Jeffrey Keene recovering memories from General Gordon's life AND looking very like him. Why would that happen if he were not the reincarnation of General Gordon, what would be the purpose of it?

Brian Stalin himself says that anyone can check the validity of his readings for themselves by using a pendulum. Now, I hadn't previously used dowsing for anything other than playing at trying to find water, before I read this, and so I looked up pendulums, and saw that they have fascinated people for centuries. I suppose I had a bad feeling about pendulum dowsing mainly because I had been warned off any sort of messing with the supernatural as a child, and took the admonition to heart. However, my curiosity got the better of me, and so I made myself a pendulum and tried it for myself. And I was astonished to find that saying to the pendulum "show me a yes" and "show me a no" elicited a real response.

I had misgivings, but was so gripped by my curiosity to know what would happen that I went through the list of people on the Brian Stalin website, that I tested them all, and the pendulum agreed with Brian Stalin *even though* I didn't, consciously. That made me ever more curious, because I had always supposed that the pendulum, if it did anything at all, would simply reflect the views of the person holding it. But not in this case.

The conflict between what I consciously thought about those cases, and what the pendulum said about them was interesting to me, and so I contacted Brian Stalin for a reading, and I will put the details of what I discovered on this blog on a separate page.

It is hard to like someone who blows their own trumpet on their website (and has such a poorly designed website too) but there is something interesting going on, and I want to understand it. The paradox for me, is that I was convinced about reincarnation firstly from my own experience of spontaneously recovered memories, and secondly from the very convincing cases I have read, which included Jeffrey Keene's and James Leininger's. If we cannot rely on any of the convincing clues to the puzzle, what can we rely on? And what indeed is the purpose of having a strong resemblance to a past person and memories that the person had?

I do believe that the Akashic Records exist, because I think that each of us is exploring the material world as part of a divine plan, and that we are collecting experiences for a purpose I do not understand. But as to whether an individual may access the records and see into past lives, I cannot tell you. I think the scientist who wants this to be verifiable and scientifically tested is in for a world of pain, because I don't see a way that this can happen without taking very seriously the premise that reincarnation may be a real phenomenon. The part of me which is curious and scientific wants to be able to test DNA and see if there is any relationship between the two samples... to understand the way it might work and why.

The spiritual part of me says that people are led to the knowledge they need or can accept, at the time that they need it and you cannot force that along. Perhaps some part of the path of being a spirit in a body is that one has to learn to trust the inner guide and learn to know what your truth is, rather than know what your truth is because it has been intellectually proven to you.... I don't know.

Like me, some people recover spontaneous memories of past lives. Mine seemed to be triggered when I shook the hand of a stranger. I wish now that I had had the courage to tll him what had happened, and to ask whether he also shared the experience. Children commonly recover memories of their past lives between two and four, but most of those who recall anything will have forgotten it by the time they start school. Many parents will not encourage memories like this, but there are some who do.

There's a lot of information online nowadays about people who claim to remember a past life:

Some people who have had near death experiences recount receiving information about their past lives in the course of a life review. Often people who return from this type of experience will talk about having understood that time is a human concept which is only useful in the body, and that things happened in a different way once their were in spirit.

The concept of an eternal now, with everythng which has happened or will happen, happening simulataneously, is difficult to understand from a human viewpoint, and most especially our understanding of cause and effect. If people who have experienced past lives and seem to have ill effects perpetuating after them, the idea that everything is happening at once begins to be problematical. If experience all happens in the eternal now, it messes with our understanding of the way history works and what leads from one state of being to another.

People struggle to explain their experiences, and even those who go on to write books and give interviews may be defeated by the impossibility of translating a transcendant experience into words. The similarities between people experiencing a near death experience and the common elements of the experience are interesting. I'd say that they are most useful for a different viewpoint of the possibility of reincarnation, for the most part. They are very subjective experiences which are difficult to understand unless experienced first-hand, I guess.

There are an increasing number of near death experiences available on Youtube through AfterlifeTV, and through Souljourns. Those that specifically mention past lives include: Hamish Miller (although he doesn't give any detail in this video);Mellen Thomas Benedict (this is a long interview on Coast-to-Coast and the part about reincarnation starts 39 minutes in. I clicked right on the moment where he says one of the things he learned was reincarnation was for real, first time when I was searching for the link for you)
I'm going to add more links to this page as I find them - I have other work to do today!

An increasingly popular way of discovering past lives, is hypnotic regressions. There are many therapists working in this field all over the world, and a few who are famous for their work on past lives in a therapeutic context. Some of them assert that it is not necessary to believe in the possibility of reincarnation to benefit from the process, and they maintain that it may be only some part of the symbolism of the subconscious which is talking when a person appears to be describing a past life under hypnosis.

Michael Newton is a therapist who was a sceptic before his first experience of having a client describe a past life. In his case, he had explored all the avenues available in adulthood and childhood to try to ameliorate the client's problem, and then instructed him to go back to the time when the problem first arose. To his surprise, the client described a past life and what is more was helped by the revelation.

Newton now specialises in life between life regressions, as he says that people have much to learn from remembering what they are in this life to achieve and why. Some of his interviews are available on YouTube, and his website has a lot of information. He appears to have a lot of challenging information from his cases, which include information about alien lives and predictions of the future.

Brian Weiss is the other psychiatrist famously working in this field, who had a similar start to his career as one of the most famous of past life regression therapists. A client who didn't seem to be able to find the beginning of her problem, suddenly recounted a past life. He is unusually eminent for someone working in this field, which is usually a career killer of the most effective kind. He is the Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

He seems a gentle and lovely man, who posts answers to his readers questions as gentle videos, and has published a number of books. He impresses as an honest and kind person who speaks from his heart. I'm not casting aspersions upon the veracity of other therapists, but this is a striking element of his pieces to camera on YouTube. He trains psychiatrists and other therapists to use past life regression in the course of therapy, and points to the very effectiveness of the therapy in dealing with people with phobias or problems that haven't responded to other therapies, including hypnosis rooted in the current life.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube for Brian Weiss, including a guided meditation for discovering your own past lives without hypnosis. It is a very relaxing meditation.

Most people who have an interest in reincarnation have heard of the work of Ian Stevenson. He was a psychiatrist who latterly worked with children to investigate their claims to have lived before. He published a number of books about reincarnation and a number of books and television programmes have been written about his work. This is a lecture he gave in 2002.

His work has been criticised, mostly because it relies on anecdotal information, that he was reliant on interpreters who may have skewed the information they were relying, and because sceptics who doubt that reincarnation is a possibility because they do not believe in an eternal spirit, do presume that the content of the cases is bunkum.

If we start from the premise that reincarnation is impossible because the existence of an eternal soul is impossible (or not scientifically proven) it presents an insurmountable obstacle to any investigation, I think. You do not start an investigation into any phenomenon with a closed mind, because then you have drawn a conclusion without any evidence whatsoever, based on your understanding of what is possible, and not on the facts. It's not a starting point for investigation, it's an end to it.

Thus, I think any investigator has to begin with an acceptance that the phenomenon that they are setting out to investigate is a real phenomenon, which is all that Ian Stevenson did. When dealing with matters of belief, or memories, or human behaviour, ideas of absolute accuracy and scientific method have to be moderated with what it is possible to know from another human. It isn't possible to be exact in the way that science demands.

Stevenson's work considered certain markers that might strengthen a child's assertion that they were a reincarnation of another person. In some cases birthmarks eerily suggested the cause of death for the person that the child claimed to have been. In many ways it is that coincidence of both memory and physical evidence that seems the most compelling in the cases that he reported. His critics have said that he was gullible, taking evidence from other people without independently checking their assertions that a child had birthmarks, and ignoring the beliefs of the parents which might influence a child. Many of the families were from cultures which had a strong belief in reincarnation as a fact.

I was convinced by Stevenson's work in the light of my own experience. I cannot say whether it would have persuaded me if I had not had that experience of shaking hands with someone and suddenly receiving many impressions and memories which I later accepted were not from this life.

Recently there have been attempts to explain the physical processes which might lead to reincarnation as a part of evolution. I must admit that I have not made up my mind about the series of lectures by Todd Murphy which purport to explain reincarnation as a part of Darwinian evolution. Maybe this is a way forward for the research, to look at how it works... that at least may appeal more to the mechanical scientists who find spiritual research challenging when they don't believe in spirit.

I have been interested in reincarnation for around twenty-five years, ever since I shook hands with a stranger and received a tumble of memories and feelings which didn't relate to my current life, but what I concluded must be a previous one.
It was an odd experience, I felt very warm feelings for this stranger I had just met, and saw in my mind's eye a jumble of snapshots and moving pictures which showed my sister and I in various places and times with this man. It took me by surprise. My husband and I were at a strange pub in Harrow for a pub quiz, representing our local pub, but I couldn't concentrate on the quiz as I was trying to make sense of the impressions I had received on shaking hands with this man - trying to fit the memories and snapshots into my current life. It became clear they didn't fit at all.
Since that moment, I have researched reincarnation and tried to make sense of it for myself. Is it truly the case that we live many lives? What does that mean for our current lives? How might that mechanism work? How does one life relate to another? What's the role of family history and DNA? Can we learn anything scientifically valid from the study of reincarnation? Does the rise of photography, computers, the information age, help us at all?
My idea for this blog is to share information and to provide links to the sites I have found. I do not want to argue with others about the validity of reincarnation... if your life experience to date has led you to discount it, I'm happy for you to feel that I am wrong or mistaken to think it may be a real phenomenon. I don't need to persuade you. I don't *want* to persuade you. I believe that we all have our own spiritual path to follow, and that it is uniquely ours. Thus, this is my path, I am happy to agree that it may not be yours.